


you fit me better than my favorite sweater

by dudski



Series: don't leave my mind [3]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Sharing a Brain, The Host AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-14
Updated: 2014-06-14
Packaged: 2018-02-04 14:22:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1782193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dudski/pseuds/dudski
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She supposes she’d tell Raleigh if he asked, but Raleigh doesn’t need to be told.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you fit me better than my favorite sweater

**Author's Note:**

  * For [disco_vendetta (brinn)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brinn/gifts).



> TECHNICALLY incomplete but what I had in gdocs ended on a decent beat and Brita loves me anyway.

Officially, the story is this: Seven years after the creation of the Jaeger program and six years after the treaty went into effect, Mako Mori found a dying man. She determined almost immediately that the human host was a lost cause, but that the Soul inside still showed signs of life, and, after carefully weighing her options, she did something that was either (depending on who you asked) colossally stupid or an awe-inspiring feat of interspecies heroism. Nobody on the planet - human, host, not even the Souls - would have faulted her for letting him die. Rescues were possible, but practically unheard of outside of the handful of former rebel cells that had adopted a Soul. It absolutely wasn’t something anyone would do for a stranger.

Officially, Mako knew he was PPDC and that she was saving a fellow Ranger.

Officially, Mako thought long and hard about the risk of never getting her body back and came to the conclusion that there wasn’t a Soul on the planet who’d willingly provoke the political shitstorm that would come with trying to keep Stacker Pentecost’s daughter as a host against her will.

Officially, it was the hardest choice she’s ever made, but she believed it was the right thing to do.

Truthfully: It never occurred to her to let him die. She’s never told anyone. She supposes she’d tell Raleigh if he asked, but Raleigh doesn’t need to be told.

xx

Coming to afterwards is strange, to say the least. She’s always taken for granted how interconnected the physical and mental are, and now her mind is waking up to a body that’s already alert, and she’s trying to shake herself awake without being able to blink or stretch or yawn. She’s been a host for less than ten minutes and it’s already close to unbearable.

_Hey,_ she hears, _you’re awake. What’s your name?_

_Mako Mori._

_Mako Mori. Nice to meet you, Mako. I’m Raleigh._

xx

It’s a long walk back to the Shatterdome, and Raleigh asks a lot of questions for someone who can just access all her thoughts and memories if he wants to know something.

_You can just look_ , she tells him. _I’m going to be a Ranger, I’m not worried about having someone go through my head._

_What’s the fun in that?_ he asks. _That’s like reading a plot summary instead of watching the movie._

There’s an undercurrent to his words that she doesn’t really understand. She reaches out experimentally, trying to get a feel for whatever it is he’s not saying.

_Oh, it’s nothing_ , he laughs. _Just...if you keep talking to me, I won’t have to worry about you going away._

She’s a little floored by that - she knew there were Souls like that (the Stryder colony was infamous for it, after all, it’s the only reason the treaty and the PPDC exist at all), but the vast majority are indifferent at best when it comes to the host’s consciousness.

Mostly, though, she’s wishing she could roll her eyes, because it’s not like this guy could force her out of her own head even if he _wanted_ to.

_Fair point, Mako,_ he says goodnaturedly. He rolls her eyes for her.

xx

Raleigh was one of the last Souls to come to Earth, after K-Day but before the treaty. Mako gathers that before that, he spent time as a Bear and a Dolphin, and his memories of those worlds are infused with joy. He avoided the See Weeds and the Spiders, preferring to stick to worlds with social, tactile hosts.

The first thing the Healer asked him when he came to on Earth was whether his host was resisting him. He didn’t even understand the question, and he’d been horrified when the Healer explained to him that the Seekers had recurring problems with resistant humans. Mako can feel the disgust that tinges all of his earliest memories of Earth. No other species of host was even capable of registering the presence of a Soul, and the more time Raleigh spent on Earth and learned about humans, the more he felt sick about what his people had done.

He requested transfer back to the Dolphins, the Bears, _anywhere_ but Earth, but it was after K-Day, and the waiting list to get off planet was outrageous. Once the treaty went through, he was one of the tiny, tiny number of Souls who willingly surrendered their host bodies to see if they could be revived, and when he woke up again to a kindly human Healer (or doctor, he always forgets that’s what the humans call theirs) telling him thanks, but there was no one left in that body to save.

Raleigh couldn’t decide if he was relieved or disappointed.

And then he just...wandered, for years. Mako lived through those years herself - she knows most Souls moved inland, surrendering the West Coast to the humans, and as more and more Souls left Earth completely, more humans were revived. More rebel cells, Mako’s included, came out of hiding, and the free human populations of coastal cities grew and grew. It’s nothing like it was, of course, but it’s more than they ever thought they’d have. She hears it’s the same all over the world. People have clustered around Shatterdomes, and the Souls tend to keep their distance if they aren’t involved in the PPDC.

Raleigh couldn’t bring himself to live among the Souls, and he didn’t feel like he had the right to live among the humans, so he kept to himself and joined up with a reconstruction team. He built housing in Kaiju-stricken cities for a few years, then ended up on a Shatterdome construction crew, and when he heard that there was a shortage of Souls who were willing to pilot Jaegers, he went ahead and enlisted. It felt like the least he could do.

(Human teams can pilot, of course - Raleigh’s found that there’s not much humans can’t do - but the PPDC has found time and time again that Soul/human teams tend to be the most stable. All the big, long-lasting teams - Stryder and Wanderer in Brawler Yukon, Lahey and Burns in Romeo Blue, Kent and M’orzz in Horizon Brave - were Soul/human pairs.)

He’d graduated from the Academy with flying colors, been deployed to his Shatterdome, and the day before he was set to report for duty, he’d been hit by a car while crossing the street, and the driver never even stopped to see if he was okay.

Mako burns with fury when she finds those memories. If she hadn’t found him - she barely even knows Raleigh, but it’s still too upsetting for her to think about.

Unsurprisingly, Raleigh is unbothered. _I met you, didn’t I?_ He laughs as he says it, but to Mako it seems like he’s a little relieved to be free of a body that he’d never felt right about inhabiting.


End file.
